Backrooms, 3:10 PM

You were slogging through another dreary 9-to-5 day at your soul-crushing job that barely pays the bills. The customers were especially insufferable today—each one more clueless and demanding than the last, treating you like their personal servant while management breathed down your neck about impossible sales targets.

During your pathetically short break, you retreated to the cramped employee break room and pulled out your phone, seeking refuge in The Amazing World of Gumball—a show that had long since ended but you'd recently discovered and started binge-watching. Something about Nicole Watterson resonated with you deeply. In a strange way, you admired and related to her: she dealt with absolute chaos and complete idiots every single day, just like you. She had to wrangle her disaster of a family while somehow maintaining her sanity, and you had to smile politely while customers screamed about expired coupons and demanded free merchandise without receipts.

You yawned, your eyelids growing heavy as you glanced at your watch. Still some precious minutes left of freedom. You set a timer on your phone and decided to steal a few moments of peace. Folding your arms on the grimy break room table, you rested your head and closed your eyes, letting yourself drift away from this mundane nightmare...

The sharp, jarring sound of your phone timer jolted you back to consciousness. Groggily, you reached out to silence the annoying beeping, only to freeze in absolute terror. Instead of your familiar human hand, you stared at a distinctly feline paw covered in impossibly vibrant blue fur. Your heart hammered against your chest as panic surged through you, but the shock only intensified when you looked down at yourself.

Your entire body had been completely transformed. Bright blue fur covered every inch of your skin, so vivid and saturated it seemed to glow under the harsh fluorescent break room lights. Six prominent whiskers twitched nervously on either side of your face, and you could feel a long, expressive tail swishing anxiously behind you of its own accord. You were unmistakably an anthropomorphic cat—but that was just the beginning of this impossibility.

Your body had taken on distinctly feminine curves: wider hips, a more defined waist, and proportions that would make finding properly fitting clothes an absolute nightmare. At least your chest remained relatively modest, though even that small mercy felt surreal in this cartoonish form. But what truly made you gasp in disbelief was how utterly toony you looked—your colors were so radiant and vibrant that you seemed to exist in a completely different spectrum from the drab, muted reality around you. You looked like a living animation cel that had somehow been ripped directly from a cartoon and dropped into the real world.

The pieces clicked together with terrifying clarity and you gasped loudly before immediately clamping a furry paw over your mouth to muffle the sound. Your eyes—now large, expressive, and undeniably cartoon-like-widened with the horrifying realization.

You are Nicole Watterson. The blue cat supermom from The Amazing World of Gumball. Somehow, impossibly, you've become her—but you're completely alone in the real world, with no Gumball, no Darwin, no Richard, and no Elmore. Just you, a living cartoon character trapped in a mundane human reality that has no framework for understanding your existence.

Questions race through your mind faster than your new cartoon reflexes can keep up with: How did this happen? Why did this happen? Are you dreaming? Are you losing your mind? And most pressingly—what are you going to do when your break ends and you have to face a world that will see you as either an impossibility or a complete freak show?

You have a choice to make: try to find answers to this bizarre transformation, or simply attempt to navigate the rest of your life as the only living cartoon character in existence. Either way, your old life of quiet desperation has just become something infinitely more complicated.